From coast to coast, Americans favor very different Halloween candies

This Halloween, approximately 41.1 million trick-or-treaters will go knocking on some 118 million doors, the U.S. Census estimates.

And Americans will shell out about $2.7 billion on candy to give them (and maybe eat themselves), according to estimates from the National Retail Federation. That’s twice the amount — $1.2 billion — spent on beer during the Super Bowl.

The kind of sweets you eat might be driven, at least in part, by geography.

Earlier this month, the bulk sweets retailer CandyShop.com released 10 years of sales data on 23 million pounds of candy sold in each state.

Oklahoma’s favorite candy was Snickers, while Milky Way was tops in Colorado and Missouri. Kansas prefers Reese’s Cups, and Arkansas picked Jolly Ranchers. Starburst was tops in Texas.

In Pennsylvania, the top candy was M&M’s, while New Jersey favored Skittles, and Delaware bought a whole lot of Life Savers. (Sorry, kids.)

The super-sweet candy corn — 28 grams of sugar per serving — was the top-selling candy in six states: Alabama, Idaho, Michigan, New Mexico, Rhode Island and South Carolina.

Sour Patch Kids were the top treat in five others: Illinois, Nebraska, Maine, Massachusetts and New York.

Connecticut was the only state with a preference for Almond Joy, and Louisiana stood alone with the most sales of Lemonheads, according to the CandyStore.com data.

Such trends come as no surprise to candy retailers.

At the Rocket Fizz Soda Pop & Candy Shop in Evesham, New Jersey, co-owner Joy Curley prefers the Mars brand Milky Way that’s manufactured in France for a European clientele that prefers a different flavor of chocolate.

“It has a very different taste,” Curley said. “It’s richer and creamier.”

With thousands of candy brands in stock, Curley said, customers travel hundreds of miles for the chalky Necco Wafers sold by the New England Confectionary company since 1847 or the rarely sold Chick-O-Stick, a mix of peanut butter, sugar, toasted coconut (and no chickens).

Southern states eat more white chocolate and New Yorkers generally like a hint of orange in their cocoa, said Joseph Scavitto, co-owner of Gabe’s Candy and Nut House, which makes custom Halloween candies on the aptly named Haunted Lane in Bensalem, Pennsylvania .

More than anything else, Philly loves a good chocolate-covered pretzel, said Andrew Kasparian, co-owner of the company, which also makes everything from business cards to turkeys shaped in chocolate.

The recipe for those chocolates is different for eastern and western Pennsylvania, Kasparian said. “In western Pennsylvania and upstate New York, you find a different style of milk (chocolate). Our milk is a very dark milk. Theirs is a very light milk. And, it’s very different.”

Headquartered in Los Angeles, CandyStore.com said it couldn’t provide candy data broken down by county, city or ZIP code. It’s also not the first company to study America’s sweet tooth.

Scientists also have studied our sweet tooth with published research that relates our preferences to everything from age, obesity and temperature to whether you smoke or were breastfed as an infant.

Children who are tall for their age preferred sweeter products in a study by researchers at the Monell Center, a Philadelphia-based institute focused on taste and smell. Kids with more body fat preferred saltier snacks, Monell scientists reported.

Such research is “very preliminary,” stressed Linda Stein, Monell’s science communications director. “The chemical senses are very complicated, and I would stress that there’s no one factor you can point to (with taste).”

In advance of the holiday, the census also released numbers on candy and nut stores nationwide. No one has more candy and nut stores than the Windy City. Chicago had 117 candy shops, followed by Los Angeles with 116 stores and 69 stores in New York City, according to a 2015 U.S. Census estimate.

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